


If You Wish Upon a Star

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Genii
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 23:37:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1406866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for SGA Flashfic's Coping Mechanism Challenge focused on the coping mechanism of fantasy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Wish Upon a Star

When Idos Servalan is seven cycles old, he is taken below ground for the first time. He has never seen anything like the machines that fill the subterranean caverns of his world--whole forests of blinking lights and cold metal. The air is cold and damp down here for all that the space is packed with people. Idos shivers.

"And now that you have come of age, you may know the truth, my son," father says to him. "A handful of our people is chosen to live above ground so that others may continue this mission in secret. We are the defenders of the Genii, the guardian of our people and their ways. We have forsaken fellowship with our people, we take up the hoe and the rake, and we deceive those who we would call friends so that one day we may take back what the Wraith have stolen from us."

"Indeed, Athor," a strange man says, clapping his father on the back. This man is tall and his face is deeply pitted. He frightens Idos but when Idos sees the genuine affection between him and his father, Idos swallows his fear. "Your father and I have rarely seen each other these past ten cycles and we will see even less of each other in future, I fear. But that sacrifice is the ultimate a Genii can make. Athor is one of the chosen as are you, Idos."

Idos understands at this tender age very little of what his father and the strange man say, but that passion, that fervor, he holds close to his heart until he is old enough to fit his understanding to the emotion.

@@@

Sora is one of the lucky, one of the privileged few who divides time between the two worlds of Genii. Her people fear exposure almost more than the Wraith, and so with few exceptions, those who are chosen to work the land and to trade with those who would come through the Ring do not make trips below ground. Their children are not even aware of the civilization buried beneath the planet's surface until they have reached an age at which they can be trusted not to reveal the secret.

Sora is born underground, the smooth chill of stone underneath her feet as she learns to walk, the heavy air thick and comforting in her lungs. When her mother dies, her father cannot bear to see the places she had once lived and so Sora finds herself in sunlight that hurts her eyes, in air that is thin and and warm, in fields of grain that stretch so far she cannot walk their lengths between sunrise and second prayer. This new Genii is open and frighteningly large--a place where she cannot breathe and she cannot hide. Sora adjusts poorly.

When she is six cycles, a trading party from Athos walks through the Ring. Though she is not yet of age, Sora has understood for years that the secrets of Genii are sacred above all else and so she does not tell Teyla Emmagen--Teyla with the long brown hair, Teyla who is older and wiser, Teyla who is kind--what lies hidden beneath the surface of the world.

"One day," Sora thinks, "these Athosians may be true allies." They may stand shoulder to shoulder against the Wraith and Sora can finally show Teyla where her mother is buried and the lines carved beneath stalagtites that mark the passage of her life.

@@@

Tavis Cowen has never been a meek man, never been one to cower and certainly not to apologize. He has walked to the top of the Genii government on the backs of the men and women who came before him and rarely stopped in gratitude as they crushed beneath his boot heels.

These visitors, these strangers who occupy the city of the Ancestors, they intrigue and enrage Cowen in equal measures. That city and all it contains belongs to the Genii--to the sons and daughters of the gods who peopled these stars. He cannot think of the weapons the strangers must control without anger that threatens to blind him. "Those weapons belong to Genii!" Cowen thinks. "To me. To me."

His people will eradicate the Wraith; of that, Cowen is certain. He has not watched thirty percent of the children of his birth cycle languish into death for nothing. The Wraith will die and his will be the voice behind that command. But even more importantly, the Genii will rise again. They will once more travel between worlds through the stars and they will take back the city those ursurpers have stolen.

@@@

Acastus Kolya falls through the Ring of the Ancestors with the searing fire of gunshot radiating through his shoulder. He lands on his back and watches the blue water of travel ripple and wink out. He will not die; he can feel that already. But who he was is now dead and so Kolya pulls himself upright and dials the Ring to someplace else.

John Sheppard is someone Kolya can admire in the abstract, a man whose dedication and unwavering loyalty are the exemplars of what he hoped to teach in the Academy. Sheppard thinks quickly and he fights dirty and his life means less to him than the least of those he has sworn to protect, and for these Kolya can raise a glass in the dead of night when his shoulder has healed enough to permit the motion.

But John Sheppard is also a thief. He has stolen what rightly belongs to the Genii and he has taken lives (the truly unpardonable sin), giving nothing in return. Kolya cannot imagine what he would have said to Athor if he had stayed on Genii to make the gesture. He has caused the death of his dearest friend's only son, a son who he loved as deeply as his own, and he will have revenge. He will have blood. There will be a reckoning.

@@@

Ladon Radim believes that he can preserve hundreds of years of Genii history while remaking its vision. That his people are laughably technologically underdeveloped has become more than apparent in the last five years. All that the Genii have worked so hard to achieve pales in comparison to the power of the Lanteans, the Travelers, the Replicators. The Genii are but one step above the farmers they used to imitate with such long-sufferance. This revelation grates on a national level.

Ladon believes that alliance is the key to a meaningful future for his people, that he can make a place for the Genii in this new world of C-4 and puddle jumpers and Aurora class starships. All that he feels down to his blood, his lineage, the historical memory of his people--these things cannot disappear. They cannot pass into obsolescence. 

"We can be those things we pretended we once were," he thinks. "We can remake our destiny and it will carry us forward another millenium."


End file.
